Mary-Claire King's work on BRCA genes has made her a perennial name in Nobel speculation. In 1994 and 1995, she showed that breast and ovarian cancer can be hereditary and identified mutations in BRCA1 and BRCA2 that sharply increase risk. That knowledge gives women the option of preventive mastectomies or ovary removal, procedures that have reduced cancer mortality for thousands.
In a STAT interview ahead of this year's announcements, King, now 80 and at the University of Washington, described how she first learned she was under consideration: an invitation to lecture at the Karolinska Institutet, which she later understood was a signal to the prize committee. She called the selection process a very narrow filter with much randomness, and said she had met both enthusiastic experts and polite skeptics during that visit.
She said she will not set an alarm for the middle-of-the-night announcement on the Pacific Coast, because the odds in any given year are extremely low. She predicted that GLP-1 drugs might win this year. She also recalled a letter from a woman who, after testing positive for a BRCA1 mutation, had preventive surgeries and sent a photo of her daughter graduating from high school — a kind of secret handshake among those whose lives were changed by the discovery.